An important perestroika-period film about nuclear winter
Winner of the grand prix at film festivals in Varna and Mannheim, Best Director at the Madrid International Film Festival, and the jury prize at the 20th All-Union Film Festival in Tbilisi.
On an American military base there is an unplanned nuclear explosion. Much of the population is killed and the world lies in ruins. Survivors inhabit catacombs and wait to be moved to a central bunker. Scientist Larsen writes letters to his dead son in which he tries to make sense of what has happened.
This debut film by Konstantin Lopushansky, a student and faithful follower of Andrei Tarkovsky, was released a month before the Chernobyl disaster and became a symbol of the era of doubt regarding the progressive ideals of the Soviet Union and of the twentieth century as a whole. Despite being clearly in keeping with the eschatological messaging of the perestroika period, Lopushansky’s film can only partly be termed a social commission. Until the idea behind the project coincided with the official line of the party there were years of ordeals and corrections to the script, a particularly notable result of which was the transfer of the action to NATO territory. Nevertheless, as film critic Oleg Kovalov noted, the catastrophic design of the film seems to originate in Soviet genetic memory of wars, revolutions, famine, and forced deportations. Lopushansky would later intensify this aesthetic in the two following parts of the «Apocalypse trilogy, ” A Visitor to a Museum (1989) and Russian Symphony (1994). The scientist, memorably played by Rolan Bykov, unsuccessfully tries to arrange the elements of unrationalizable destruction and chaos into a positive hypothesis of progress, and Lopushansky, in the spirit of the age, contrasts this with irrational belief in a miracle. It may be the impulse of repentance and self-sacrifice that made Dead Man’s Letters an iconic sci-fi movie of its time and incorporated the image of the scientist leading children into a nuclear winter to celebrate Christmas into the official iconography of perestroika.
Dead Man’s Letters
Director Konstantin Lopushansky
USSR, 1986. 88 min. 12+
